This is the last installment of our interview with cartoonist Anders Nilsen; 1, 2, 3.

Moving on to the much more traditionally narrative Big Questions. It’s evident that you had been leading up to Algernon’s descent into Hades for a while before it became obvious that that’s what you were doing. What made you decide to adapt the myth? [of Orpheus and Eurydice]

It’s funny, I actually didn’t mean to adapt the myth. It just sort of worked out that way. Once I realized that that was the story I was telling, I liked it, and I’ve been trying to reinforce the connections a bit. Bringing in more of Algernon’s singing for example. I’m also just really interested in myths, fairy-tales and religious stories like the Bible. They are endlessly interpretable and adaptable. A bottomless source. They’re the template for pretty much all storytelling in the Western world. Whether by design or by stumbling onto them I think there is much to be gained from brushing up against them, borrowing, stealing, rewriting and quoting from them, whether subtly, like the story you mentioned or overtly like in the Sisyphus story I did in Kramers 4.

Continuing our interview with cartoonist Anders Nilsen; 1, 2, 4.

CAMBRIDGE-CHICAGO 2007
A lot has happened since we last spoke : back in the Fall of 2004, I believe it was : but I think I would like to pick up more or less where we left off, which will also maintain the chronology somewhat. We ended up talking about your drawing, and about approaches to storytelling with drawing, and you’d just started publishing comics in your much looser sketchbook style back then. In the years that have passed, you’ve published Monologues for the Coming Plague, as well as a couple of pieces in Mome in which you make use of that approach. Could you give me an impression of what it has given you in terms of your storytelling, and how you think it supports your artistic endeavour?

I just re-read the older interview… Indeed, a lot has happened. There are several things that might be worth re-visiting. One being that I’m not working as a cook anymore (for which I am very grateful).

As for the present question… I think I touched momentarily on it previously, but it is really helpful to me to have the two different approaches running simultaneously. I started the looser-styled stuff, what turned, ultimately, into Monologues for the Coming Plague, while I was working on Dogs and Water. I was working on that book as well as Big Questions, and that meant all the drawing I was doing was for relatively polished, finished, official-feeling stories. Until that time I had always kept sketchbooks, which allowed a degree of experimentation and playfulness. The amount of work I was doing for BQ and DW had eclipsed that. Also, though both those projects are in a way improvisational, they are/were slow to realize. I was inspired in part by going on a tour with several other cartoonists to start drawing, and storytelling, purely for fun again. To varying degrees I’ve kept both styles going in the years that have followed, and still have, though both have evolved, partly because of events in my life. The End isn’t about humor or absurdism in the same way, but it grows pretty directly out of that more experimental work. I’m a great believer that once an artist knows exactly what they are doing, there is a problem. Leaving myself open to various possibilities is part of keeping myself on my toes and also keeping myself entertained, which is really what it’s all about in the end. I occasionally lament the potential polish or seamlessness I have traded for that restlessness, but ultimately I think I’m happier. And hopefully more fun to read as well.

Continuing our interview with cartoonist Anders Nilsen; 1, 3, 4.

Another reason I asked is that I just read your new book [Dogs and Water], which seemed a little bit more constructed than your previous work. I mean, it doesn’t come off as tightly constructed or anything, but there seems to have been some guiding thought put into how it’s put together. You interject the main narrative with those scenes of the man on the water, for example…

That’s interesting, because when I first did the story, it was 73 pages and there was no dream sequence, or whatever that is. The last 20 pages were him on the water and it seemed really disconnected from the body of the story, so I ended up lengthening the first part and interjecting the second part into the story. Um… I’m trying to think whether it was more constructed… I think I struggled with it more. It came from a series of really quick strips I did several years ago, drawn on top of photographs with whiteout, sort of experimental [since printed in Mome]… and when Chris Oliveros asked me to do a story for the [Drawn & Quarterly] Showcase, I thought about those strips right away and started thinking about how I could expand them. So I basically started out by taking those two and redrawing them as regular comic pages and when I was done I was completely stumped as to where else to go with it. As I said, it was originally a 73-page story, but there were a ton more pages I didn’t use, and then I ended up throwing 25 of the supposedly good pages as well and doing about forty more new ones. So I don’t know whether it was more constructed, but…